Sufjan Stevens and the Curious Case of how Pitchfork remains relevant today

Sufjan Stevens and the Curious Case of how Pitchfork remains relevant today

Posted: July 15, 2019

The article is supposed to be about the 50 states PR move around the, then new, artist Sufjan Stevens. It is about that, but this is the piece that kills me:

The tipping point came in late July. Pitchfork, the increasingly influential arbiter of indie (full disclosure: I am a contributor there), had given the album a lukewarm review—“a 7.5,” Gill claims, “and it wasn’t Best New Music.” Except the site’s top editor, Ryan Schreiber, had not actually heard it. “We were bugging him to actually listen to it. And then he listened to it and he freaked out and he was like, ‘I can’t believe we gave this album a 7.5,’” Gill says.

Pitchfork is such a waste of space. They were/are so influential, yet clearly are fine with making up scores and standing behind articles written about albums that hadn’t listened to.